Posted on 01/02/2003 8:10:59 AM PST by jdege
Pink Pistols: www.pinkpistols.org
Twin Cities chapter: www.pinkpistols.org/local/tc/index.html
Twin Cities chapter email: twincities@pinkpistols.org
Guns-are-a-good-thing site: www.handguncontrol.net
Guns-are-a-bad-thing site: www.handguncontrol.org
To know us is to love us, right?
Five years After Ellen, mainstream media are crawling with queer characters, darn near every last one adorable, well-off and usually ten times more entertaining than the hets around them. It's gotten so you can't swing a plate of Petrossian caviar anywhere on NBC without hitting a few witty, urbane, non-heterosexual persons squarely in their bottles of Johnny Walker Blue.
Somehow this hasn't stopped people from trying to kill us.
Even if the queer community's growing - and overwhelmingly non-threatening - presence in pop culture hasn't slowed the rate of gay-bashing, you might expect the last decade's tide of state-level legislation against hate crimes at least to stabilize the rate at which queer folks are getting attacked.
It hasn't yet. Hate-crime laws specifically protect sexual orientation in 22 states (and gender identity in an additional five - including Minnesota - plus the District of Columbia). The FBI's latest Hate Crimes Statistics report, released Nov. 25, however, indicates a 7.2% increase from 2000 to 2001 in the number of reported hate crimes based on a victim's sexual orientation.
So we haven't won them over with Rosie and Will & Grace. And we haven't yet found legislative measures that increase our safety. What can we do?
One organization has an idea. It's so simple. So obvious. So brilliant.
Make gay-bashing dangerous.
Pink Pistols was started as a target-shooting club two years ago by Doug Krick, a 30-something gay man now living in Boston.
"I got some friends together to go shooting," Krick says today. "I thought, 'What else do we have in common? Aha! We're all queer.'"
Krick noticed that scattered handfuls of people would go target-shooting together. "And I thought, 'Okay, how can we work on this to coordinate within local areas?' Internet. That means a website. Then I began thinking I could probably have some fun with this one. Let's put out a press release."
Armed with a list of national media fax numbers assembled during an unsuccessful run at state office (as a Libertarian), he fired off a press release announcing the formation of the Pink Pistols.
"I wasn't expecting Newsweek to bite," he says with a laugh. Newsweek ran a short article on Pink Pistols in September, 2000. "Next thing I know, people are saying, 'I want to play, too. Can I start a chapter here?' Sure, knock yourself out."
Krick had drawn inspiration for the name Pink Pistols from a www.Salon.com article by Jonathan Rauch, a gay, Libertarian writer who saw the bright side of arming as many gay people as possible. Krick also drew inspiration for an unmistakable political agenda: No longer did he simply want Pink Pistols to help pro-handgun GLBT people locate each other. He wanted Pink Pistols to start working for the right to carry handguns.
The discussion on whether the citizenry ought to have legal access to handguns and assault weapons is, of course, much larger than the queer community. The debate stretches from sea to shining sea and extends as far back as the accidental invention of gunpowder. Whoever had gunpowder (or the recipe for gunpowder) had an extraordinary tactical advantage over an enemy whose armament was limited to catapults, archers, and swordsmen.
The twist here is that Pink Pistols actively promotes gun ownership, education and training for GLBT people in response to having become the third-most-frequently targeted group for hate crimes. It's not about some lofty ideal about minimizing government regulation of a person's second-amendment rights; it's an unambiguous call to fight back.
As you can see from the artwork at www.pinkpistols.org.
Krick enlisted Oleg Volk, a Minneapolis man who runs the pro-gun-ownership website A-human-right.com, to come up with some graphics that illustrate Pink Pistols' position. Volk, who moved to Nashville last year, came up with some images "mainly by analogy with any other group singled out for persecution," he says. The most jarring one doesn't really work in on a black-and-white page. The pistol has a rainbow stripe on the handle, and the triangle is pink.
Linking the atrocities of World War II to their own struggle to keep handguns is a common tactic for the pro-handgun community. The Million Mom March, a national organization composed primarily of women who work for more-strict gun control, has attracted the particular animosity of many pro-handgun groups. One website screams, "Be prepared for the brutal truth about what happens when your guns and means of self-defense, and the defense of Liberty are given up or taken away" and shows two horrifying photos of what it mockingly calls "the first Million Mom March" - a crowd of women gunned down by Germans and Ukrainian collaborators.
Today over 2,300 people participate in over 30 Pink Pistols chapters nationwide. The local chapter started up in October. Bob Odden organized the first meeting. "If anyone needs guns," he says, "it's gays."
Odden himself doesn't own a firearm. "It is fun to shoot, though," he says. "I enjoy that."
Odden started the chapter in part to meet other gay conservatives like himself. "I can read (in the media) anytime I want about some liberal position," he says. "They get a lot of coverage. I talk to other gays, and I would say a good portion of them are Republicans and Libertarians, but you don't really read about them. They have good opinions, too. I'd like to get to know some of these people."
In fact, he himself isn't really comfortable with guns. Suppose, he says, that he did carry a concealed handgun. "I would have a tremendous fear about firing when I shouldn't be firing … or suppose someone walks in between you and your target. … Now, that's the kind of thing you can learn, but I'm hesitant."
His vision for the chapter is to have a social club to get people comfortable with guns. "If they wanted to, (guns) might be another consideration in their self-defense strategy, and certainly we'll look into non-lethal strategies." The emphasis, he says, is on "our own personal safety, with the idea being that people need to accept some responsibility for protecting themselves. It's not up to the government to protect us."
Just as Log Cabin Republicans raise eyebrows among their GLBT Democrat friends, Libertarians - with their lefty social ideals and right-leaning ideas about taxation, the role of government, and the second amendment - remain a mystery to many queer folk.
Nancy Burkholder attended the first local Pink Pistol meeting in October, which drew a mixed crowd (queer and heterosexual). She's been a sport shooter for 20 years.
"I'm always in someone's sights," Burkholder says. "(Republican Governor-elect Tim) Pawlenty and (Republican Senator-elect Norm) Coleman - they're not my friends. But the Democrats aren't my friends, either. … For the most part, I think that if you advertise that you enjoy shooting, it's not going to win you many friends in the (GLBT) community. The community is not friendly to gun enthusiasts."
In fact, many pro-gun GLBT people will tell you that the gun community is more welcoming to GLBT people than the GLBT community is to gun owners. A few years ago, Odden attended a lobbying event at the state capitol with a pro-handgun group called Minnesota Concealed Carry Reform, Now! "I think they liked us." It was fun, he says, "to see a gay group there at a redneck event" and be so welcomed. "And it's kind of neat to go into a group like that, and when they see your plight, you can form alliances."
Krick thinks the anti-gun attitude might come more from GLBT community leaders than from the GLBT community itself. "One reason we're getting such an open-armed welcome from the gun community," he says, "is that they take a 'we don't care' approach. They're getting beat up by everyone lately, so they're welcoming any new faces to the cause."
"Beat up on"? Maybe, maybe not. Two months ago the east coast was paralyzed with fear of a random sniper, and the gun lobby was ridiculed for only managing to say, "No, we really don't see the need for a national registry that could trace which gun shot which bullets." Bowling for Columbine is making every hipster's must-see list, as much for its politics as for its giftedly contemptuous host, Michael Moore.
But the gun lobby can give as good as it gets. Visit www.Handguncontrol.net, a pro-handgun website. In odd, all-caps typography, the site handily accuses Handgun Control, Inc., - now The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence - of racism. One prominent page reads - and these are their parentheses - "HCI's major themes: Average citizens (especially lower-income and minorities) lack the intelligence or judgment to own any type of gun, much less a handgun."
Even Minnesota Nice can get a little ugly. At that first local meeting in October, you couldn't help but notice the way a few people renamed the Million Mom March: the "Million Moron March."
Both the gun-control side and the pro-gun-ownership side can produce a stack of statistics telling you why their ideas about gun ownership are correct. One often-quoted 1998 Journal of Trauma article by Arthur Kellermann (an MD with a master's in public health) reported that guns kept in the home for self-protection are 22 times more likely to kill somebody the gun owner knows than to kill in self-defense.
In 2000, John Lott, a senior research fellow at Yale University Law School, published More Guns, Less Crime, suggesting that allowing people to carry concealed handguns reduced the crime rate. (In fact, he wrote in an August, 2001, New York Post column, "In up to 98 percent of the cases, simply brandishing a gun is sufficient to stop a crime.")
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence counters that crime was falling throughout the nation in the 1990s, and in fact fell slower in states that allowed people to carry concealed handguns.
But what about GLBT people who carry handguns?
Bob Smith, a straight guy at the first meeting, had an interesting way of putting it. "Gays are nice people," he said, "and nice people make good victims."
He's got a point, at least metaphorically. The image of the helpless homosexual who got beat up every day on the playground and now minces around as if made of glass doesn't seem to want to go away. Everyone watches Jack McFarland; no one watched Butch Gamble (John Goodman's gay character on Normal, Ohio).
Compounding the pervasive belief that GLBT people are weak is the fact that many out-of-town, closeted GLBT people will visit a gay bar when they come to the Twin Cities. That they're closeted often means they carry cash in order not to use a check or a credit card at a gay bar. And it means they're less likely to report an assault or robbery. So if you're a thug who can wave a gun, grab a wallet, and run away, you're likely home free.
OutFront Minnesota, the state's largest GLBT advocacy organization, has not yet taken a position on handgun ownership. OutFront deputy director Doug Federhart describes himself as "being more of the Gandhi school of things." He says, "Speaking from a personal perspective, I just don't think it's ever a good idea to respond to violence with more violence, even if it's in self-defense."
A missing piece of this conversation is that it's pretty difficult to get a permit to carry a concealed handgun in many parts of Minnesota. Most people are allowed to have a gun in their homes, but they can't tuck it into their briefcase or backpack and carry it around. Permits are issued at the discretion of a city's police chief. Good luck getting one in the Twin Cities.
Burkholder had a license when she lived in New Hampshire, but didn't need one when she lived in Vermont. "I usually carried then, but I never had to use it. It really was a shock to come to Minnesota and discover Minnesota's attitude toward guns," she says. "The government treats me the exact same as a criminal. We have the same chances to get a conceal carry permit. That hurts. That's really hard."
Her years of safely carrying a handgun and her successful completion of gun-safety courses count for nothing. "The government doesn't trust us," she says. Clearly, arming a bunch of people in a call to fight back creates its own dangers. Having more guns around means having more accidents. And little incidents - someone looks at someone wrong, or two people get into a shoving match - can escalate quickly when one's packing heat.
And vigilantism. No member of Pink Pistols will ever tell you that they want to arm and train queer people so that we can all go settle some scores. But one gets a sense that some Pink Pistols members wouldn't mind engaging the enemy.
For example, Burkholder opposes non-concealed carry permits - where a person could just carry a handgun in plain site. "That's a very bad idea," she says. "The idea with concealed carry is that no one should know you have it. If there is criminal intent, you've just tipped your hand. The criminal knows to avoid you."
Volk's interest in handgun-ownership stems from live-and-let-live philosophy. "My sense of justice," he says, "required that anyone be able to fend off hostiles." Volk invokes more WWII imagery when he says, "In real life, I'd like to see the brownshirts of all types to become an endangered species, thanks to the ability of their traditional victims to return fire with interest."
Pink Pistols isn't saying you have to own a gun, or even that you ought to. Increasingly, Pink Pistols chapters are discovering the range of how to serve their members best. "Different chapters emphasize different things," founder Krick says. "Here in Boston, it's more focused on the handgun. The Virginia chapter will go out and do self-defense courses. Some people are talking about the possibility of hunting."
The message, fundamentally, is the same - that GLBT people aren't afraid of guns, or of fighting back.
Brad Fletcher probably best represents the middle-of-the-road Pink Pistol member. He's never fired a gun. "They scare me," he says. "It is such a dangerous weapon. There's really no challenge you can put back. A sword, at least you can fight back. People had a chance with things like that."
He was a little skeptical when he first heard about the local chapter's first meeting. "I thought, hmm, a gun group, huh?" he says. "I thought, Oh my God, what's going on, are we really getting some interesting faction groups in our community now? Is this going to be a dangerous thing? Something we need to be concerned about? What kind of wackos would go to something like this? And then we started talking, and I was like, phew, wipe the sweat from my brow. And then they said it was going to be more about self-defense, and a light bulb went off. Now I get it."
Fletcher himself was attacked in downtown Minneapolis in the early 1990s. After that, he took a few self-defense classes through community ed. He plans to continue being involved with Pink Pistols because it sounds like a comfortable place for him to learn more self-defense.
Your garden-variety patron does not walk into Over the Rainbow or the Saloon with a handgun. And it's unlikely they'd have a permit to do it legally, anyway, which actually does deter peaceful, law-abiding people. But consider this.
On Sept. 22, 2000, in Roanoke, Va., a man named Ronald Edward Gay walked into a gay bar called Backstreet Café. He opened fire, killing one person and wounding six others. The Washington Post reported that Gay told police that he was angry at jokes people made about his last name. He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and is serving a life sentence.
What if he had heard about a group called Pink Pistols, where gay men, lesbians, bisexual people and transgendered people were learning to handle firearms? What if he'd heard that they were working for change in the concealed carry laws? What if he'd heard that they thought it was just flat-out wrong that they couldn't carry wherever they wanted?
Would he suspect some people at a gay bar might bend the rules a little and carry a handgun? Would he consider that the bartender might have a firearm behind the bar, and five years of target-shooting experience, and a faster draw than Doc Holliday?
Would he still have walked into the Backstreet Café looking - as he reportedly told police - "to waste some faggots"?
On one level, it doesn't matter if Pink Pistol members ever get the gun laws they want. As soon as they can create doubt in a potential attacker's mind, their most important work is done.
Even a peacenik like Federhart agrees. "I don't think that's necessarily a bad idea," he says. "I could see that as more of a psychological tool. I'm more a fan of psychological and nonviolent tools than of violence."
The cover of the issue was the Pink Pistols logo and slogan, in black on pink - so even people who don't actually read it are going to see it.
The legislative session starts in a couple of weeks, and we'll be pushing concealed carry reform, again. Hopefully for the last time - the odds are in our favor. (We failed on a tied vote in the Senate last session, and we picked up seats in the election).
This couldn't have been better timed if we'd planned it ourselves.
Try this:
Pink Pistols: www.pinkpistols.org
Twin Cities chapter: www.pinkpistols.org/local/tc/index.html
Twin Cities chapter email: twincities@pinkpistols.org
Guns-are-a-good-thing site: www.handguncontrol.net
Guns-are-a-bad-thing site: www.handguncontrol.org
Media Overlooks Hate Crime Perpetrated By Homosexual?
The Homosexual Link To Pedophilia
They need to get the beam outta their own eye before pointing out the speck in the culture's eye.
Even if the queer community's growing - and overwhelmingly non-threatening - presence in pop culture
Non-threatening?
Yeah, sure. Tell that to Cardinal Law and all the other Catholic prelates nursing homo sexual priest abuse 2002 hangovers.
How long has this round been available to law enforcement? If generally only LE and military routinely uses body armor, why is it necessary for LE to have body piercing ammo/weapons systems?
From the link, I suppose us peons in flyover country will never be permitted to own/use this ammo or sidearms chambered for it?
A large percentage of homosexuals engage in sex with minors. Too large. Just ask the Catholic church.
lead you to seemingly oppose the right of the rest of them to defend their liberties
Where in my post does it say this?
They have the same constutional rights as you and me, no less and no more.
Those rights include the 2nd amendment rights.
Recognizing the enthusiastic acceptance of bottlenecked pistol cartridges (as evidenced by the .357SIG and 400 Cor-Bon) and looking to take advantage of their popular family of Guardian semi-automatic pocket pistols, NAA in the summer of 2000 began development of a new round. While the idea was spawned at NAA, it was nurtured by internationally recognized ballistics expert Ed Sanow, who remained as technical consultant throughout the 18-month project. Sanow was engaged to explore the concept, participate in identifying the target performance parameters, make engineering recommendations and conduct and quantify the ballistic testing of the resultant round, which is the recently introduced .32NAA.
"Almost everything I've learned about the science of ballistics has come from reading "Street Stoppers" : The Latest Handgun Stopping Power Street Results written collaboratively by Sanow and his co-author, Evan Marshall - Copyright ©1996, published by Paladin Press), said Chisholm. While often controversial and contradictory to many vested interests, Marshall and Sanows "logic and conclusions were incontrovertible ... authoritative and thoroughly researched ... these guys are the foremost authorities on this subject", according to John Farnam of Defense Training International. "It seemed an obvious choice to solicit advice from the best", Chisholm concluded.
For this project, NAA felt fortunate to attract Cor-Bon (manufacturers of the Glaser Safety Slug) as their design and manufacturing partner. Peter Pi, president, and his team at Cor-Bon are widely recognized experts in the development of very high performance cartridges. Cor-Bon first earned their reputation by developing a police-specified 9mm 115-gr. JHP (+P) round ("without a doubt, the most effective self-defense ammunition we have ever tested". Gun Tests 08/96), further burnished by their personal defense dominating .40S&W 135 gr. JHP. Additionally, Cor-Bon had previously demonstrated bottlenecking expertise with their 400 and 440 magnum handgun cartridges.
Some specs :
The .32NAA was built from the foundation of an ordinary .380ACP case, necked-down to house a .32 caliber bullet. Behind the neck, all case dimensions and configurations, including the extractor groove, rimless case, cartridge diameter and bolt face engagement are identical to the .380ACP. Cor-Bon determined that a headspace on the shoulder allowed a solid crimp on the bullet, reducing the possibility of the bullet pushing into the case from recoil and chambering. After finalizing a case design which maximized case capacity of the cartridge as well as allowing sufficient case neck so that a bullet would be held securely, Cor-Bon spent several months testing a wide variety of bullets of different weights and configurations, finally settling upon a proprietary design from Hornady. The platform for this new system is the existent .380ACP Guardian, appropriately bored and chambered for this cartridge ; no other mechanical changes were found necessary.
The results :
While disparagingly referred to by some as a 'mousegun', this pocket pistol and the Cor-Bon .32NAA cartridge combination yields some very impressive results. In summary, using custom commercial grade powders, the final load achieved 1222 f.p.s. and 199 ft.lbs. from the 2.5" barrel of the Guardian itself (1453 f.p.s. and 287 ft.lbs. from a 4" test barrel). Additionally, the .32NAA:
produces more velocity, more energy and more stopping power than any .32ACP, .380ACP or .380ACP(+P), with 15% less recoil (Power Factor) than the (+P),
penetrates 8.3" of gelatin after passing through 4 layers of denim, expanding to a .55" mushroom with a retained weight of 100%,
has a Fuller Index of 62% One-Shot Stops, compared to (for example) the .380ACP Federal 90 gr. Hydra-Shok at 53%. Asked about future derivatives, Chisholm indicated that the same team plans to follow-up with the .25NAA, a .32ACP cartridge necked down to house a .25ACP bullet, fired from a .32ACP Guardian-sized pistol. Originally conceived by noted gunwriter J.B. Wood, it is expected to be introduced later this year.
According to Chisholm, some have begun to refer to this mouse-caliber cartridge as "mighty" and "speedy", but certainly not "mickey". "Characterizations such as those are for others to make," said Chisholm, tongue in cheek. "My lawyer's plate is already full enough".
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